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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Michael Daniel of Waco, Texas, was charged on Monday for an incident earlier this month in which he allegedly got down “on his hands and knees and chased a neighbor while barking and growling like a dog,” according to KWTZ.

Daniel then took a black dog onto a house's front porch, beat and strangled the canine and then “began to bite into the dog, ripping pieces of flesh away,” Waco Police Sgt. Patrick Swanton told KWTZ.

Daniel allegedly told neighbors he was high on synthetic marijuana, sometimes called K-2.

A 1994 attack on Tupac Shakur at a New York City recording studio left the rapper fighting for his life and sparked a new level of violence in the East v. West Coast rap war which eventually claimed the lives of both Shakur and Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace. Though rumors had circled the incident for years, no one was found guilty of the crime.

Philips writes that Rosemond's admission came during his attempt to cop a deal that would lead to less jail time.

Tupac himself placed the blame on Rosemond in "Against All Odds," a song he recorded after the incident: "Jimmy Henchman ... / [You] set me up, wet me up ... stuck me up / But you never shut me up."

Interestingly, no one will ever be charged for the 1994 shooting. The crime was classified as a robbery, and the statute of limitations on prosecuting it has passed.

Rap fans (and conspiracy fans) would do well to give Philip's piece a read, as he has been looking into Tupac's murder for quite some time now. Someone should also tell Suge Knight about the developments, so he can tell Pac.

"I don't deny it wasn't stupid, looking back now," Garrison said. "But there again I say what 21- or 22-year-old in this world hasn't made some stupid mistakes?"

In an interview with the Cherokee Tribune, the sheriff accused his opponent, David Waters, of leaking the photos in an attempt to damage his character.

"I’m deeply appalled he would stoop to this level," Garrison said. "It’s clearly an act ofdesperation on his part and I believe that the voters will respond accordingly."

Jodie Fleischer, the WBS reporter that obtained the photos of Garrison, would not reveal her source, but said that the pictures did not come from Waters. According to an Associated Press report, Waters said he was shown the photos last year, but did not act on them.

Maria Lloyd, a blogger with Your Black World, is the daughter of Mario Lloyd. In 1989, Mario was given 15 life sentences for drug distribution by a judge in Chicago. It was his first offense and it was non-violent. His daughter is writing an open letter to the judge describing the pain of growing up without a father, as well as the humiliation of having to tell her friends that her father was incarcerated. Maria believes that her brother would not have died from gun violence had his father been there to guide him.

Most Americans agree that the War on Drugs was a tremendous failure, leading to Draconian sentences given to hundreds of thousands of men, mostly black. It has torn families apart for decades, and even the Obama Administration has spoken out against it. Given that President Obama made campaign promises to reduce sentences of those convicted of drug crimes, should he use the power of the pardon to commute sentences for those who’ve been left to die behind bars?

It took me some time to address you because I didn’t know you were the source of my anger until recently. In case you care to know who I am, I’m Maria Lloyd- the daughter of Mario Lloyd, the non-violent, first-time offender from Chicago. You sentenced him to 15 life sentences without parole on May 11, 1989. He has been incarcerated since I was the age of two. In addition to sending my father to prison, you also sentenced my grandmother, my aunt, and my uncle. You basically incarcerated my entire family.I’m not one to make excuses for anyone’s poor decisions, including those of my own family. They broke the law, so they deserved punishment. I get it. I also get the point you were proving in punishing them: Drug trafficking is not tolerated in the state of Illinois. It’s quite obvious you were taking a very personal stand against the War on Drugs. Well, as you can imagine, I have too, but I’m sure our views differ.

A newly released video shows Florida neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman at the scene of Trayvon Martin's fatal shooting a day later giving police a blow-by-blow account of his fight with the teen.

In a video posted on a website by Zimmerman's defense team, Zimmerman said Martin saw his gun and reached for it as the two scuffled on the sidewalk at a gated apartment community in Sanford. That's when Zimmerman said he pulled the gun and shot the teenager.

The tape shows two butterfly bandages on the back of Zimmerman's head and another on his nose. There are red marks on the front of his head.

On the tape, Zimmerman did a reenactment of the scuffle with Martin in the moments before he shot the 17-year-old from Miami. Zimmerman said Martin kept "slamming and slamming" his head on the sidewalk. "It felt like my head was going to explode," he said.

Monday, June 18, 2012

A Georgia woman is charged with murder and deprivation after her teenage daughter was found dead of apparent malnourishment on Saturday.

Police arrested Ebony Berry, 38, after someone in her Cobb County home called 911 to report that a 16-year-old girl was unresponsive, CBS Atlanta reported. When officers arrived, the teen was already dead from malnourishment and neglect.

Few Americans know that June 19, or Juneteenth, is Independence Day for many folks of African descent.

Also known as Emancipation Day or Freedom Day, it commemorates the end of slavery, the seminal event in African-American history.

President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took effect on Jan. 1, 1863, but the word did not spread instantly.

According to one account from published slave narratives of how the holiday began, the Emancipation Proclamation was read to slaves in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, more than two years after it officially went into effect. As word of the end of slavery spread, Juneteenth was created to commemorate that day.

Folklore tells why the news of freedom took so long to arrive.

One story is that slaves were intentionally kept ignorant about their freedom in order to allow crops to continue being harvested.

Another has one messenger traveling by mule from the date of the Emancipation Proclamation to deliver the news, and it simply took more than two years to arrive from Washington, D.C., to Texas.

Yet another story has the messenger being murdered before he could deliver the message.

Juneteenth has been a state holiday in Texas since 1980, and it is either an official holiday or an observed day in at least 17 other states -- Alaska, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma and Wyoming.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

A man and woman from suburban Chicago face felony child abuse and child endangerment charges after police said two of their five children were found blindfolded with their arms and legs bound in a Kansas Walmart parking lot.

The jailed couple from Northlake, Ill., appeared in court by video Thursday in Lawrence in eastern Kansas. Bonds for both were set at $50,000. They were appointed public defenders, and preliminary hearings were scheduled for June 21.

Monday, June 11, 2012

A woman was severely burned Monday after being doused in gasoline and lit on fire outside a 7-Eleven store in South Florida in a dispute with the father of her child, police said.

The 34-year-old woman was waiting in her silver Mercedes at the store shortly before 3 a.m., Boynton Beach Police spokeswoman Stephanie Slater said. She was meeting her ex to pick up her 4-year-old son for whom they share custody.

Roosevelt Mondesir, 52, arrived in his white Jaguar without the boy and began throwing gasoline on the unidentified woman's car and body, according to a police affidavit. She tried to run away, but police said the man chased her with a knife and then ignited her.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Megachurch pastor Creflo Dollar staunchly denied Sunday that he punched and choked his 15-year-old daughter in an argument, telling his congregation the allegations made in a police report are nothing but "exaggeration and sensationalism."

"I will say this emphatically: I should have never been arrested," Dollar said in his first public appearance two days after police charged him with misdemeanor counts of simple battery and cruelty to children.

The pastor got an enthusiastic ovation from the packed church as he took the pulpitSunday at the World Changers Church International in metro Atlanta. He addressed the criminal charges head-on for several minutes before moving on to his sermon.

"I want you all to hear personally from me that all is well in the Dollar household," Dollar said.

A California water agency director has been arrested on suspicion of felony child abuse after a neighbor shot and posted online video of him whipping his stepson with a belt after he failed to catch a baseball.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

As Rudy Holder walked down East Harlem's main drag, everyone seemed to remember him. One man after another greeted him with a handshake or a quick, one-armed hug. Each exchange brought a nervous look to Holder's face: Friend or foe? Some of the men he recognized. Some he didn't. But they all knew him.

"Trouble," they said, again and again. It was the nickname he'd earned as a teenager.

After serving 12 years in prison, Rudy Holder had come home to East Harlem on parole, joining the 725,000 others who are released from correctional facilities each year across the country. Holder's crime was gunning down two rivals, neither fatally, in 1993. In returning to Harlem, he was hoping to avoid the cycle that engulfs so many ex-convicts and lands them back in jail time after time.

"It's still weird coming back here," said Holder, now a baby-faced 37-year-old, the sun glinting off his shaved head.

A lifetime ago Holder chased little girls in braids and rough-housed with the bigger boys. He spoke with a stutter, which disappeared when he sang, as he often did, with the famed Boys Choir of Harlem. By the age of 10, he was a star drummer at the Pentecostal church where his father was a minister.

In the years to come, the life of a choir boy gave way to fistfights and, later, to gunplay. The unluckiest of his friends wound up dead. Most of the others, Holder included, would end up serving time in prison or on a loop between the city streets and the city jail.

That cycle of repeated arrests and incarcerations comes at a high price to the states, which collectively spend about $52 billion a year on corrections costs. That number has quadrupled over the last 20 years as changing law enforcement philosophies, including the so-called war on drugs, have meant more aggressive policing, criminalization and incarcerations.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

A newspaper report has found that the Stand Your Ground self-defense statute in Florida is more likely to succeed when the victim is black.

The Tampa Bay Times looked at 200 cases and found that in instances in which the victim was black, the person who invoked the defense went free 73 percent of the time. If the victim was white, the person walked free 59 percent of the time. The report also found that more than two thirds of all the people who invoked the law were acquitted, and that the defense is being invoked in more and more cases.

"People often go free under 'stand your ground' in cases that seem to make a mockery of what lawmakers intended," wrote the Times reporters. "One man killed two unarmed people and walked out of jail. Another shot a man as he lay on the ground. Others went free after shooting their victims in the back. In nearly a third of the cases the Times analyzed, defendants initiated the fight, shot an unarmed person or pursued their victim — and still went free."

On a flat and desolate stretch of Interstate 10 some 50 miles south of Phoenix, a sheriff's deputy pulls over a green Chevy Tahoe speeding westbound and carrying three young Hispanic men.

The man behind the wheel produces no driver's license or registration. The deputy notices $1,000 in cash stuffed in the doorframe -- payment, he presumes, for completed passage from Mexico. He radios the sheriff's immigration enforcement team, summoning agents from the U.S. Border Patrol. Soon, the three men are ushered into the back of a white van with a federal seal.

This routine traffic stop represents the front end of an increasingly lucrative commercial enterprise: the business of incarcerating immigrant detainees, the fastest-growing segment of the American prison population. The three men loaded into the van offer fresh profit opportunities for the nation's swiftly expanding private prison industry, which has in recent years captured the bulk of this commerce through federal contracts. By filling its cells with undocumented immigrants caught in the web of increased border security, the industry has seen its revenues swell at taxpayer expense.